When is a pound not a pound?
Well, in the language of the modern Westminster operator, it appears the answer is straightforward: when it arrives not as cash but as a donation or a carefully arranged suite of professional services, staffed offices, and corporate-sponsored expertise. The defence, when challenged, is always the same. Technical. Legalistic. Designed to be true in the narrowest possible sense while being profoundly false in every sense that actually matters.
The Rt Hon Darren Jones, now Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and previously Chief Secretary to the Treasury, offered precisely such a defence when scrutinised over his relationship with “Labour Together”, the influential think tank at the operational heart of the Starmer project. His response was firm:
“I have not received a pound from Labour Together.”
You have to admire the precision. “Not a pound. Not a penny.” Clean hands, apparently. Except that the Register of Members’ Financial Interests tells a rather different story, written in the dry, bureaucratic language of declared interests that most voters will never read and most editors will never publish. Let us read it for them.
The Ledger That Does Not Lie
Between January and July 2024, in the months before a general election that would deliver Labour its landslide, Darren Jones received two separate secondees from Labour Together, provided via the central Labour Party to support his front-bench role. The first, registered 30 January 2024, carried a declared value of Β£29,756.39. The second, registered 27 February 2024, was valued at Β£27,685.19. Together: Β£57,441.58 in staffing costs, covered by a single political entity whose registered address sits in a quiet street in East Finchley.
But Labour Together was not alone in its generosity. The same register records a secondee from Arup, the global engineering and infrastructure consultancy, valued at Β£33,264.25, and a secondee from Baringa, the management consultancy, valued at Β£34,356. In total, the man who would become responsible for public spending and national infrastructure strategy received over Β£125,000 in professional services from organisations with very specific commercial interests in the policies he would go on to shape.
The nature of Arup’s involvement with particular care. According to reporting by openDemocracy, the Arup secondee helped Jones’ office run a high-profile review into major infrastructure projects that asked big corporations, among other things, whether there were any regulatory changes or policy recommendations they believed would accelerate investment. The results of that consultation have not been made public. Perhaps they never will be. Jones is now the minister responsible for precisely the infrastructure decisions that consultation was designed to influence.
“Labour Together may be theΒ most exciting new think tank on the centre-leftΒ – relentless in its ambition not just to help shape a government, but to build a new politics that is bold, reformist, and rooted in the age we live in. One this country badly needs.” -Darren Jones MP | Chief Secretary to the Treasury
If a friend pays your rent directly to your landlord, have you received a pound? Technically, no. Effectively, your financial obligations are met, your household functions, and your benefactor has bought themselves a relationship. In Westminster, seconded staff are the political equivalent of paid rent. They draft the briefings, they build the relationships, they free the minister to focus on the business of power. That they are not counted as cash is not evidence of their innocence. It is evidence of how the system has been designed.
The Spider’s Web: Labour Together, the McSweeney Machine, and the Democracy They Bought
Labour Together: The Operation Behind the Curtain…
To understand what Labour Together actually is, one must set aside its official description as a think tank and look instead at what it has done. Founded in 2015 as Common Good Labour and later relaunched under Morgan McSweeney’s direction from 2017, the organisation spent years presenting itself as a broad-based, grassroots initiative to unite a fractured Labour Party. It was, according to subsequent investigations, nothing of the sort.
The Sunday Times revealed that between 2017 and 2020, Labour Together failed to declare Β£730,000 in donations from millionaire venture capitalists and businessmen, including hedge fund manager Martin Taylor, philanthropist Trevor Chinn, and businessman Gary Lubner. The Electoral Commission, after investigation, fined the organisation Β£14,250, a sum that invites the unkind observation that British democracy was purchased for rather less than the cost of a London flat deposit. McSweeney described the failures as an administrative error. Friends noted that record-keeping was not his strong suit.
But the money mattered enormously. It paid for polling and clandestine campaigning that identified Keir Starmer as the candidate best placed to win a Labour leadership election. It funded the network-building that would deliver that leadership to him. Some of Labour Together’s financial supporters donated Β£205,000 to Starmer’s leadership campaign directly, a sum representing 30 per cent of his total cash donations. Had the funding been declared on time, the press, the public, and critically, Labour’s own members would have understood that this supposedly neutral forum was in fact a well-funded vehicle with a specific mission: to restore the party to a form that its wealthy donors found acceptable.
The New Statesman, not given to hyperbole, described Labour Together as an “incubator” of Labour’s 2024 manifesto. By October 2023, the organisation had received over Β£1.8 million in donations since Starmer became leader and had grown from one member of staff to 34, with a wider network of policy fellows taking the total headcount to nearly 80. It had embedded secondees in the offices of nine shadow cabinet ministers, including Rachel Reeves, Yvette Cooper, David Lammy, Angela Rayner, Shabana Mahmood, and Darren Jones. According to openDemocracy, the total value of Labour Together secondments across senior party figures exceeded Β£565,000.
When Labour won its landslide, or should we more accurately state the Tories lost their support, these same figures became the government. Reeves became Chancellor. Lammy became Foreign Secretary. Mahmood became Home Secretary. Cooper became Home Secretary. Jones became Chief Secretary to the Treasury. The secondees who had shaped their thinking in opposition did not, in several cases, return quietly to their previous employers. Labour Together, it was reported, had declined to confirm whether its secondees would find their way into advisory roles in government.
McSweeney: The Architect and His Methods
Morgan McSweeney is, or rather was until his resignation in February 2026, the most consequential unelected figure in British politics. Born in Macroom, Co Cork, he arrived in London at seventeen, worked on building sites, dropped out of university, spent six months on a kibbutz in Israel, and eventually found his vocation in the machinery of Labour Party politics. He joined the party in 1997, cut his teeth in the attack and rebuttal unit at Millbank, and by 2017 had founded Labour Together, the vehicle that would bring him to Downing Street.
His mentor was Peter Mandelson. His methods were Mandelson’s methods. John McTernan, who served as Tony Blair’s Director of Political Operations, once called McSweeney “the heir to Peter Mandelson,” and the comparison was apt in ways McTernan perhaps did not intend. Like Mandelson, McSweeney operated in the shadows. Like Mandelson, he understood that power flows from the control of information, the selection of candidates, and the management of internal opponents. Like Mandelson, he proved that the rules which govern ordinary political actors need not necessarily apply to those sufficiently embedded in the machinery of power.
The early confidential strategy papers from Labour Together reveal the scope of his ambition. McSweeney wrote that the group would cultivate “seemingly independent voices to generate and share content to build up a political narrative.” They launched campaigns targeting publications they deemed alt-left or alt-right, identifying articles they considered problematic and contacting the advertisers of those sites. Readers of Labour Heartlands will not require assistance in identifying which end of that political spectrum found itself most energetically targeted.
When the Sunday Times began investigating Labour Together’s undeclared donations in 2023, the organisation’s response was not transparency. It was the hiring of APCO Worldwide, a crisis communications and PR firm, with instructions to investigate the journalists writing the story. The resulting document, dubbed Operation Cannon, made various claims about the journalists’ professional conduct, personal lives, and sources. APCO’s briefing was shared with GCHQ, which reportedly declined to investigate. Neither of the targeted journalists was made aware of the investigation into them. Josh Simons, the Cabinet Office minister who ran Labour Together at the time and commissioned APCO, maintained that the firm was asked only to look into a suspected hack.
Jon Cruddas, the former Labour MP who helped found the organisation in 2015, described the revelations about Operation Cannon as “shocking” and “extraordinary.” “I have heard of black briefings,” he told openDemocracy, “but never heard of anything like this. This is dark shit.” It is the kind of verdict that tends to land harder when it comes from someone who was there at the creation.
The Mandelson Thread: Where the Web Leads
McSweeney’s loyalty to Peter Mandelson endured through everything. It was McSweeney, according to multiple reports, who personally pushed for Mandelson’s appointment as Britain’s Ambassador to the United States, overriding concerns raised by colleagues and, according to the Daily Telegraph, against the advice of British intelligence agencies. He did this in full knowledge that Mandelson had maintained his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor, a friendship that extended to Mandelson sharing market-sensitive government information with Epstein during his tenure as Business Secretary.
When the scandal broke with full force, McSweeney’s advice to Starmer was to defend Mandelson rather than dismiss him. One source told Politico: “Everyone was like, this is looking really bad for the Prime Minister and Morgan was like, no, we need to defend him.” The loyalty, in retrospect, was not merely personal affection. Mandelson was the patron. McSweeney was the client. The entire architecture of the Starmer project had been built on foundations laid by Mandelson’s New Labour network, his donor relationships, his understanding of how the Labour right maintains control through financial leverage and institutional capture. To sacrifice Mandelson would be to acknowledge the nature of those foundations.
McSweeney eventually resigned in February 2026. His written statement was a masterclass in the genre: dignified, self-exculpating, and technically truthful. He took responsibility for recommending Mandelson, acknowledged it had damaged trust in politics, and described stepping aside as “the only honourable course.” Starmer accepted the resignation with expressed gratitude, noting a “debt of gratitude” for years of service. The man who had been the most powerful unelected figure in British politics departed as quietly as he had operated, leaving behind him a government whose composition, whose funding, and whose ideological direction had been shaped, to a degree still not fully understood by the public, by the organisation he had built.
The Counterargument, and Why It Fails
The standard defence of this system deserves a fair hearing. Shadow ministers, the argument runs, lack the resources of the Civil Service. They must staff up somehow. The secondment system allows talented people from the private and third sectors to contribute their expertise to the process of opposition, strengthening the quality of policy development and ultimately serving the public interest. The donations are declared. The interests are registered. The system is transparent. What, precisely, is the problem?
The problem is this. The Register of Members’ Financial Interests exists because parliament understands that undisclosed support creates undisclosed influence. The register does not exist as a bureaucratic formality. It exists because we know, as a matter of political science and simple human psychology, that organisations do not spend over Β£125,000 staffing a single minister’s office out of philanthropic enthusiasm for good government. They spend it because they expect something in return. The question the register asks us to consider is not whether the declared interest is technically legal. It is whether the declared interest may have influenced the member’s judgment. Darren Jones’ own words on the register confirm this: these interests are declared “so they can judge for themselves any influence it may have on a Member’s judgment.”
The man who now oversees national infrastructure strategy had his policy thinking shaped, in the crucial pre-election period, by staff provided by an engineering consultancy and a management firm with direct commercial interests in infrastructure contracts. The man who helped set public spending priorities had his front-bench office staffed by a think tank whose donors included the very hedge fund managers and corporate figures whose tax arrangements and financial activities would come under Treasury scrutiny. To describe this as clean is to mistake the register for an absolution, when it is in fact an accusation waiting to be understood.
A Democratic Emergency
Step back from the details and consider what the full picture reveals. Labour Together is, at its operational core, a vehicle created by Morgan McSweeney, trained by Peter Mandelson, funded by hedge fund managers and corporate donors who kept their identities hidden for three years in breach of electoral law, and fined a sum that amounts to pocket change for an organisation that channelled over Β£2 million to the Labour Party and directly financed the election campaigns of a dozen current government ministers. Its secondees helped write the manifesto, staff the shadow cabinet, and shape the policies that now govern the country. Several of those secondees, it is reported, found their way into advisory roles in government.
When it came under journalistic scrutiny, it hired private investigators to target the reporters investigating it. When its architect faced questions about his role in the Mandelson scandal, the Prime Minister offered him full confidence until the pressure became untenable. When the Electoral Commission investigated its undeclared donations, it accepted the “administrative error” explanation and declined to revisit its findings when new evidence emerged.
This is not a story about one think tank and one minister’s staffing arrangements. It is a story about how British democracy has been systematically captured by a small, well-funded network that understands the rules well enough to bend them without formally breaking them, and that has proved willing to deploy methods, including the investigation of journalists, that cross the line between aggressive political operation and something considerably darker. The working people who voted Labour in 2024 voted for change. They got a government shaped in its formative years by the priorities of hedge fund managers and corporate consultancies, staffed by the graduates of a think tank whose donors were hidden from public view, and led by a Prime Minister whose rise was engineered by a man whose mentor was simultaneously sharing government secrets with a convicted paedophile.
What Must Be Done
Three things are required, and they are not complicated. First, the Electoral Commission must publish its full investigation into Labour Together and its undeclared donations. The public has a right to know the complete story of the money that made this Prime Minister. Second, the in-kind secondment system must be reformed. The register of interests is not a substitute for a genuine firewall between corporate interests and ministerial policy-making. MPs who receive significant secondment support from organisations with commercial interests in the policies they will subsequently shape should be required to recuse themselves from related decisions, not merely to declare the interest.
Third, and most fundamentally, a serious parliamentary investigation must examine how Operation Cannon came to exist, who authorised it, what was done with its findings, and why a political think tank felt confident enough to direct private investigators at journalists and share the results with an intelligence agency. A free press is not an inconvenience to be managed. It is the mechanism by which the electorate learns what is being done in its name.
Darren Jones may be perfectly sincere when he says he did not receive a pound from Labour Together. He is also the minister responsible for spending the nation’s money, operating from an office that Labour Together helped staff, in a government that Labour Together helped build, advancing policies that Labour Together helped shape. The Register of Members’ Financial Interests was created so that the public could judge for themselves.
Let them judge.
They called it a think tank. The Electoral Commission called it a rule-breaker. Jon Cruddas, who helped found it, called what it became “dark shit.” The voters who trusted Labour with the largest majority in a generation deserve to know that what they elected was not merely a party.
It was a machine, built in the dark, funded in secret, and now running the country...
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